Ales Pushkin

Biography

The column with the posters managed to get only from the Theatre Institute to the House of the Press. On 25 March 1989, the anniversary of the proclamation of the Belarusian People’s Republic, the student Ales Pushkin was carrying twelve posters he had written that contradicted the official ideology. One showed the flag of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic of 1951 and an inscription in Belarusian: “Enough ‘socialist’, let’s revive a people’s Belarus!” About a hundred people were detained, the artist among them. A few days later the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Belarusian SSR tightened liability for unregistered symbols, and Pushkin was sentenced to two years on probation, with the loss of certain civil rights for five years.

He was born on 6 August 1965 in Bobr, in the Minsk region. At thirteen he entered the Akhremchik Republican Boarding School for Fine Arts, in the class of Piotr Sharypa, and in 1983 began studying monumental and decorative art (murals and mosaics for public buildings) at the Belarusian State Theatre and Art Institute. In 1984 he was drafted into the army, served in Afghanistan and returned to his studies in 1986. By some accounts, he kept a diary in Belarusian in the army, and the diary was judged anti-Soviet; this is hard to verify.

His diploma in 1990 was the mural “The History of His School” in the vestibule of that same boarding school: 215 square metres, six months of work, polyvinyl acetate tempera. On the wall are Francysk Skaryna, Michał Kleofas Ogiński, Adam Mickiewicz, Andrei Tarkovsky and Vladimir Vysotsky. The mural survives, and for it Pushkin was admitted to the Union of Artists of the USSR.

At the same time he was being drawn into the movement for national revival. In 1988, in his fourth year, he organised the first circle of the Belarusian Popular Front, and for helping to prepare a rally for the Day of Remembrance of Ancestors he was arrested for 15 days (by other accounts, for five days, and the term was later changed). From these years come words he said in public: that he dreamed of a Belarus “without Jews and communists”. Many Belarusian Jews reacted to them with sharp disapproval. Later, in the 1990s, he said that he dreamed of a Belarus with Jews and communists.

After the institute he was assigned to the Art Combine in Vitebsk, a state-run workshop for artists. There he found premises for a studio and prepared the exhibition “Sots Art. Declarative Art”, preceded by the performances “7 November”, “Vitebsk Behind Bars”, “Spring”, “Liberty” and “Love”. On 25 March 1991, Freedom Day, he rode through Vitebsk on a donkey to the sound of a brass band, holding a dove, and released the bird with the words: “It will bring us freedom!” On 23 March 1993 he opened one of the first private non-commercial galleries of contemporary art in the country, “At Pushkin”, of about fifty square metres, not far from the Marc Chagall Museum. It operated until 1997. In those years he also did stage design at the Yakub Kolas Drama Theatre: “King Lear” (1993–1994), “Miss Julie” (1997) and “No One Writes to the Colonel” (2001), and in 1994 he designed the stage and costume sketches for the International Festival of Contemporary Choreography.

Restoration and painting of churches also belong to the 1990s. In the church of St Stanislaus in Mogilev (now the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary), the figures in his murals included the disgraced politician Zianon Pazniak; some of the frescoes were later removed for political reasons. Restorers criticised this work: in their assessment it caused irreversible losses to the old painting, although other participants defended what had been done. In 1996 Pushkin painted the Orthodox church in his native Bobr, rebuilt after its destruction in 1936, and in 1997 he was married in it. In the scene of the Last Judgment the faces of the sinners resembled Metropolitan Filaret and President Alexander Lukashenko. After the fresco was shown on the programme “Vesti Nedeli” in 2005, the church authorities sent an archpriest to Bobr, and that part of the wall was painted over. The wooden church burned down on 17 February 2011; it is now being rebuilt in brick.

His best-known performance came in 1999: he overturned a cart of manure outside the administration of Lukashenko (“Pus for a President”). The court gave him two years on probation. In the same year he received the Charter 97 prize “For Courage in Art”.

On 26 March 2021 the Prosecutor General’s Office opened a case over a portrait of the underground figure Yevgeny Zhikhar at an exhibition in Grodno; the prosecutors saw in it the “rehabilitation of Nazism”. Pushkin did not cancel his flight from Ukraine and returned the same evening. That night his studio was searched, on 29 March he was dismissed from Belrestavratsia, a state restoration organisation, and the next day he was arrested. Eight human rights organisations, among them Viasna and the Belarusian Helsinki Committee, recognised him as a political prisoner. On 30 March 2022 he was sentenced to five years in a prison colony.

He died on 11 July 2023, in custody, in a hospital in Grodno to which he had been transferred from Prison No. 1. He was buried on 13 July in Bobr.